“Is she okay?” I reached out an arm so she could lean on me instead.
“She didn’t drink that much,” the guy said. “But I don’t think she really knows how to handle it.” He sounded sober. “We’re all trying to get gone, though. We would have taken her home, but she wouldn’t say where y’all live.”
“Far,” I said. “Thanks.”
We found a towel in Wendi’s trunk, and I sat in the backseat with a dozing Anita and laid the towel over her lap in case of emergency. We pulled out of the vast compound and Wendi lowered the windows. The air was fresh but cold and smelled like peeled potatoes.
“Can’t she choke on her vomit?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Wendi said. “Better that than spewing.”
We were minutes from the interstate, on one of those roads with gated houses, when Anita suddenly began knocking on the door. “Pull over, pull over,” I said. Wendi did, and I edged out with Anita. We knelt on the grass by a Keller Williams realty sign, and I caught her hair while she retched. Vomit splattered the sign. After expelling, she inhaled deeply. “Alcohol. It’s fun, everything gets more fun.”
“You’re not making the greatest pitch.” I pointed at the ruined open house sign. I had defended her to Wendi, and I’d meant it—she did work. But I felt betrayed. I’d thought we were both waiting. “Why were you guys drinking at school?”
“Issa cross-country thing. Haaazing.” Her words ran into each other like cramped cursive handwriting.
Anita was wiping her mouth with her hand and picking at the un-vomity grass, and I got the sense from the way she was screwing up her shoulders that she was preparing to release a torrent of pent-up feelings on me the way she had in her kitchen a month ago. I wanted none of it now. I couldn’t win—either she kept me at a distance, which ached, or she drew me close, which resulted in disgust that she’d shown herself to me at all, followed by an even crueler distance.
Wendi honked, unconcerned about disturbing the residents of the nouveau plantations.
“Homeward bound, Ani,” I said, and she giggled. I stood. Anita grabbed my hand and hoisted herself up next to me. She linked her arm through mine and stumbled back to the car while I bore much of her weight. Every touch that might have felt sacred some other time now felt like confirmation that she took me for granted. In the backseat of Wendi’s car, Anita laid her head on my lap, and I hastily shoved the towel beneath her hair to make a pillow, to separate her hot cheek from my zipper.
Wendi surveyed me in the rearview mirror knowingly, rolling her eyes, and switched on Death Cab for Cutie until we reached the Dayals’。
“It was fabulous to meet you,” she said to Anita as we hopped out. “I’m sure I’ll see you at Harvard.”
Anita’s eyes crossed. “You like-like Neil,” she said. “That’s why she’s so mean to you.”
I tugged her to her door, my face burning. As Wendi sped away, I checked over my shoulder—my house was dark. I was still, to my parents’ knowledge, at debate.
“You’re sure your mom’s not home?” I whispered, and Anita laughed, as though the prospect was ridiculous. Inside, I put her in her bed and kept a trash can by the pillow, copying the gestures my mother adopted when someone fell sick. Anita’s nightstand was piled high with school things—composition notebooks, a chemistry textbook, a Folger edition of Macbeth. Above all that was the Harvard shrine that had papered her walls since middle school: a crimson pennant, a beat yale sign someone’s cousin had donated, a page torn from a lookbook featuring a diverse array of students taking in the sun on the Yard. Anita sat up, unclasped her gold hoop earrings, and placed them atop Macbeth before flopping onto her stomach.
“Neil,” she said, more to the pillow than to me. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Who?”
“The guy, the guy, Sam. Sam.” She emitted a kind of horse whinny. “He likes Mary Claire Turner. Em-cee. She has no butt. It’s flat, just shwoop, back there. He doesn’t even see me, he looks shwoop, right through me.”
“Why did you go out with those kids? Your mom would kill you if you’d gotten caught. And where is your mom?”
She shrugged. “I dunno.” A hiccup, racking her whole frame. “She has places she goes places, I dunno, like, she’ll say, ‘I’m not like other moms, I leave you alone,’ but one day I’m gonna drown in all her lemonade.” A hiccup that turned into a gag.